There's a lot to unpack with Seattle Seahawks and DK Metcalf

DK Metcalf says he wants to be traded out of Seattle. This has seemed inevitable for about 14 months. It has always made sense because his contract (much like DK himself) was a ticking time bomb.

Why did DK request trade from Seattle Seahawks? Bump’s take

The team was always going to have to sign him or trade him, and it makes a lot more sense to trade a wide receiver looking for a third contract. It makes even more sense when the team expresses a desire to beef up its trenches and play physical, running football. And it makes even more sense when that receiver, while extremely talented and productive, has never quite been viewed as elite.

It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that we are at a point where the Seahawks may deal their top wide receiver. As you may know, I have been asking for them to do this for over a year, and I hope they are still able to get maximum value for him. I hope they use whatever capital they get back to transform their roster into exactly what head coach Mike Macdonald needs to play the style he wants to play.

The Seahawks have a unique opportunity to take advantage of a draft class built on big people up front and improve both sides of the line of scrimmage. This could be a watershed moment in taking this team from good to great.

Should the Seahawks trade DK Metcalf? Yes. That’s the easy question. The harder one is why he is the one asking to be dealt. What caused DK to ask for a trade? That takes some speculating.

The most obvious answer is always money. DK, understandably, wants to get paid. Again. He views himself as being in the same league as Justin Jefferson, Ceedee Lamb, and (especially) AJ Brown: three receivers that are making more than $30 million per year.

The Seahawks, understandably, should be gun-shy. Wide receivers on their third contracts have just recently been traded for late-round draft picks and/or released to try to save salary cap space. As they slow down physically, they generally don’t live up to the productivity necessary to justify those enormous salaries.

That lesson should be even more important in Seattle where the coach has said repeatedly that he wants an offense that complements his strong defense with a power running game. The Seahawks need to invest their resources on the line of scrimmage and that likely put them at odds with a receiver looking for his next big payday.

But two other things jump out to me. The first is that the Seahawks have also been engaged in trying to make a decision on quarterback Geno Smith, and the last few weeks they have been openly talking about finding a deal to keep him in Seattle. There have long been rumors of friction between the quarterback and his top wideout, so the timing of this report strikes me as relevant. Did DK ask for a trade because he doesn’t want to spend more time with Geno?

Years ago, Keyshawn Johnson taught me that wide receivers judge each other based on who is throwing them the ball. They know they play a dependent position and they always want to be dependent on the right person. (Oddly, they seem to forget how dependent they are when contract negotiations roll around.)

If DK doesn’t believe in Geno and he saw the writing on the wall that the team was going to invest in him at quarterback, he may very well have decided he needed to be somewhere else. This could also be because he saw the emergence of fellow wide receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba as a second-year pro in 2024 and doesn’t want to be playing second fiddle to anyone.

I admit, some of this speculation is based on the report that he “prefers a contender,” per ESPN’s Adam Schefter. You could read that two ways. Does he mean he wants to be traded and he would like to go to a contending team? Or is he saying that he wants to be traded because this team doesn’t qualify as a contender in his mind?

If you read it the first way, this is most likely about money alone. If you read it the second way, this sounds more like a shot at the quarterback and/or the team that is empowering him.

The second thing that jumps out to me are the comments ESPN Seahawks reporter Brady Henderson made on our show this week, which is essentially that if DK gets dealt, it could be because the team has grown tired of his personality.

DK is phenomenally talented, charismatic, and hard-working. But he has also had his moments of hardheadedness and outright disrespect to his coaches. That includes on-field incidents, penalties galore, and dismissive comments made about coaches trying to curb his behavior. If some of those incidents have risen to surface in the public eye, how many more have taken place behind the scenes?

I’m sure the organization wasn’t happy with DK making this public just minutes after they had made a special point of giving Tyler Lockett his day in the sun. I wonder how the other players took that as well.

If the problems run deeper than we know, the team could certainly be unwilling to negotiate, and that could set off a player we know to be hot tempered already. Would DK have asked for a trade rather than face more discipline from a coach that sure seems to demand it more than his predecessor did?

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We probably won’t know why this all transpired until a deal is done and he is playing elsewhere. Even that is no guarantee because the team would need to receive a significant enough offer to make a trade worth their time. But this is a huge step towards remaking this team in the style the coach wants. And finding out why DK wants out will give us a lot more insight into what life has been like inside that locker room.